Of Nehru it can truly be said that he was a hero of his age who has become an outcast of ours. Venerated while he lived—by his countrymen especially, but also by progressive-minded people everywhere—he has been savagely attacked since his death. Once acclaimed as the founder of India’s democracy and secular state, he is now reviled for having (allegedly) shackled the Indian economy and for having (again, allegedly) founded a political dynasty.
Walter Crocker anticipated this decline in Nehru’s reputation, although even he might have been unprepared for how far it has fallen. Towards the end of his book, he writes that ‘it is probable that when the dust has settled Nehru’s achievements as ruler will be scaled down. Scaling down is a common fate for statesmen no less than for writers. It happened with Roosevelt; it will probably happen with Churchill and De Gaulle. The scaling down might be on India as much as on Nehru… In the words of Alberto Moravia, the Italian novelist (who visited India and was much taken with Nehru), with Nehru’s death India enters a prose epoch’.
In a later work, Crocker observed that the ‘enormous prestige’ that Nehru enjoyed in his lifetime ‘will probably be written down in the future. That of Gandhi, on the contrary, will wear better. Gandhi was an Indian nationalist but much more; for instance, he had taken the measure of machine civilization and of some other great truths. Yet whatever mistakes Nehru made they will never diminish his interest as a man.’
Crocker’s words have proved to be uncannily prescient. Some of his other forecasts, about India in general rather than Nehru in particular, have also been vindicated. At the time he wrote his book, the 1960s, there was much concern about whether Indian democracy would survive Nehru’s death. Aldous Huxley was only the most brilliant of a clutch of Western intellectuals who argued that with Nehru gone, India would come under army rule or become a fascist dictatorship. Crocker however insisted that ‘those who know India well mostly feel that somehow, and in the end, and despite all the signs to the contrary, and all the strains on stability, she will come through and will remain more or less what she is now, namely the parliamentary democracy which Nehru left behind him. The Indians share with the British a long-term preference for the middle of the road.’
While India would most likely remain democratic, the form and content of this democracy would undergo major changes. ‘It is unlikely,’ remarked Crocker, ‘that there will be a place in India again for a ruler like Nehru—the aristocratic liberal humanist.’ He believed that ‘if India is not run by dictators, Rightist, or Leftist, or Militarist, she will be run by politicians, more and more drawn from, or conditioned by, the outcastes and the low castes. For this is the majority, and, thanks to the ballot-box, it will be the votes of the majority which will set up and pull down governments; votes won through promising more and more to the needy and the many.’
Forty years down the line, we can see Crocker’s prediction being fulfilled in good measure. Westernised Brahmins like Jawaharlal Nehru, once so dominant in Indian politics, now find no place in it. The main players are drawn from the lower orders, representing—in varying degrees—the backward castes which constitute the majority of the electorate. And so, as Crocker wrote, ‘in abolishing the British raj, and in propagating ideas of equality… Nehru and the upper-class Indian nationalists of English education abolished themselves. Nehru destroyed the Nehrus.’
The last of Crocker’s predictions that I shall quote concerns the part of India where I myself live and work. ‘South India has counted for too little in the Indian republic’, wrote this Australian diplomat in 1966. ‘This is a waste for India as well as an unfairness to south India, because the south has a superiority in certain important things—in its relative lack of violence, its lack of anti-Muslim intolerance, its lack of indiscipline and delinquency in the universities; in its better educational standards, its better government, and its cleanliness; in its far lesser practice of corruption and its little taste for Hindu revivalism. If the English language is saved to India as a living language it is the south which will save it.’
Once more, one must give this political astrologer close to full marks. South India does matter much more to the Indian republic, now that the freeing of the economy from the clutches of the state has unleashed the potential that Crocker had sensed lay submerged underneath. The rise of the south has indeed owed a great deal to its having ‘little taste for Hindu revivalism’, to its better schools and colleges, to its love of English, and—a factor not mentioned by Crocker—to its relatively more emancipated womenfolk.
In his assessment of the Indian prime minister, Crocker was probably helped by his citizenship of a nation with comparatively few people and with no stakes in the Cold War. Contemporary American assessments of Nehru were biased—not to say blinded—by the fact that their country had allied so strongly with Pakistan. (Nor did it help that Nehru was prone to sententiously lecture them on the avarice of capitalism and the futility of the nuclear arms race.) With their own special relationship to India, the British were hardly capable of objectivity, either. Where the Tories dismissed Nehru as a hypocritical humbug, British leftists were overcome by imperialist guilt, so much so that they always gave not just Nehru but also his daughter Indira Gandhi the benefit of doubt.
As it happens, two Canadians, the scholar Michael Brecher and the diplomat Escott Reid, also wrote decent books on Nehru. Like Crocker, they too came from an English-speaking Commonwealth country with no ‘agenda’ in India. However, Crocker’s book is in a class of its own, as confirmed by two very independent-minded Indian writers when it first appeared. In the review quoted earlier, Nirad Chaudhuri wrote of Crocker’s Nehru that ‘its interest and value as a first-hand testimony is quite disproportionate to its length…’ A year later, while reviewing another book on the same subject (Marie Seton’s Panditji), Khushwant Singh remarked that Crocker’s study was ‘by far the best work to date’ on Nehru, ‘both as a man and as Prime Minister’.
The most authoritative study of Jawaharlal Nehru’s life and career remains the three-volume work published between 1975 and 1984 by S. Gopal. However, the book now in your hands is without question the best brief life of a man who was for so long identified with his country. It is very good to see that it has, and not a day too soon, now been brought back into print.
Bangalore, August 2008
* The letters, diaries and reviews quoted in this introduction form part of Crocker’s papers, which are held by the University of Adelaide, and were consulted by this writer on a visit to that city in July 2007.
Introduction
To sum up any man’s life is rough justice at the best. The effort, the achievements (real or meretricious), the failures, the suffering, the secret soul behind the face, and the long long years themselves, can seldom be contained in a few thousand words.
To sum up in a few thousand words a life like Nehru’s, nearly twice as long as Napoleon’s, and nearly as full, risks being an impertinence. Nehru was the first prime minister of India, and during most of the eighteen years he was head of government he wielded an authority usually reserved to dictators. If his political ideas were fairly uncomplicated, Nehru the man was not.
For some years I had thought of writing his life, and to this end devoted my leisure hours. But I gave it up. For one thing two biographies appeared while I was still at work, and though they stopped at a point relatively early in his prime ministership, they were good books. For another, I came to feel that things we need to know, such as about Kashmir, or what really happened in Sino-Indian relations, or in his relations with certain individuals, or what Nehru really had in mind at this or that point, will not be revealed until the letters, diaries, memoirs, or other papers of certain persons, as well as the official papers, have been made public; which will be some time well in the future. By that time the world will have forgotten and will care as little as it does now for matters which once inflamed public passions, such as the Ems Telegram, or Jameson’s Raid, or the Ulster Rebellion in 1914, or how an
d to whom Lloyd George sold peerages after World War I. As for Nehru himself, he seemed frank, and in some respects was frank; but much remains concealed. He was reserved by nature; the years of high political responsibility intensified the reserve.
Final judgement, as always, is for the historians. It is possible that future revelations will heighten, or will lower, Nehru’s stature. But it is not probable. It is unlikely that the picture we have of him by 1964 will need much change.
Whatever the verdict of history on Nehru may be, either as leader or as man, he will remain one of those rare personages who form an inseparable part of their age. There will therefore be many more books on him, and room for more than one view of him.
Over two periods between 1952 and 1962 it was my job to watch Nehru day by day. Had my job in Delhi been anything else I would still have watched him, out of interest, almost helpless interest. He was interesting because of his political importance but still more interesting because of himself. Mostly I admired him; occasionally he was disappointing; but always he fascinated me. As I watched him longer than his biographers, and saw him come full circle from the highest to the lowest point in his reputation, I am setting down these personal impressions, as recollected in August 1964, while they are still fresh in my mind. The historians in the future will know more of the documents but not Nehru himself nor the men who figure in the documents.
In setting them down my concern has been not to please anyone, and still less to hurt anyone, but to tell the truth as far as I could know it. Nehru, like India itself, is big enough for the warts not to be left out of the picture.
The views expressed are my own alone. They have no connection with the views of either the British or the Australian governments in whose employment I was serving during my years in India.
CHAPTER 1
Watching Nehru
I first saw Nehru in 1945. At the time I was serving in the British Army, and the end of the war happened to find me in India for a while before demobilisation. Nehru had not long been out of prison and was making a triumphal tour in Bengal. Crowds gathered to see him at the railway station in my area; huge and enthusiastic crowds. I noticed at the station where I was waiting for him that his evident satisfaction with the crowd’s welcome did not prevent him from impatiently pushing—some of my brother officers said slapping—people who got too near him. Neither as a Britisher, nor as a soldier concerned with law and order in Bengal at that moment, was I predisposed towards Nehru, one of the arch agitators and troublemakers, as we thought him. We were ignorant of his story, and ignorant of mistakes made on the British side, but Lord Wavell,1 the viceroy, had recently reproved him publicly for some of his speeches, and the reproof seemed to us to be well merited. Nehru’s speeches had been inflammatory and had again and again thrown doubt on the good faith of the British government—Attlee’s government2—about its willingness to give India independence though at that very time discussions were taking place for arranging independence. The nationalist agitation, moreover, in its mass parades, its mass chanting of slogans, its badges and symbols, and its frenzy and raving, reminded us uncomfortably of the Nazis to stop whom we civilians had become soldiers.
I left India in August 1946 just after the great killings,3 as the Calcutta massacres of Muslims by Hindus and Hindus by Muslims of that August, came to be called. The carnage, already horrifying, would have been unspeakable had British Army units not taken over control. I was glad to go, as this was the third mob uprising, and the most bestial, I had witnessed in Calcutta, the others being in November 1945 and in February 1946. Of India I had seen only Bengal, and only for about a year; but what I had seen I did not like and I soon put India out of my mind. I neither expected nor wanted to see it again.
But, by one of the accidents of life, less than six years later I found myself back in India, in 1952, as head of Australia’s diplomatic mission. I stayed in India for three years. I found these three years so interesting that I gladly accepted the chance to return four years later in the same capacity. On this second occasion I stayed for three and a half years.
During the six and a half years I was serving as high commissioner, Nehru was the focus of my daily working life. Inevitably, I saw a good deal of him.
He lived in the house4 formerly occupied by the British commander-in-chief, a big two-storeyed house set in a garden of several acres. Unlike many Indians—there are conspicuous exceptions, such as M. Krishnan5—Nehru had an interest in nature; he was fond of gardens and flowers; his garden was one of the best in Delhi. But for all his flowers and his pandas and other pet animals there was little of a private house about the prime minister’s residence. The greater part of the ground floor was taken up with offices where men worked in shifts throughout the day and night. This was part of the prime minister’s own secretariat; the other part was in the external affairs ministry. (When Parliament was in session he spent much time in his office in the Parliament building.) The daily stream of visitors began with the assemblage in his garden at 8.30 most mornings, when anyone with a grievance, or a suggestion, or just a wish to look at him, could come. Few were the weeks when special deputations of the people were not coming to his house. Often they took up quarters on the footpaths adjoining or opposite to it. Families running into scores, men, women and children, would camp months on end opposite his gate, cooking, bathing, and sleeping there. He showed irritation with them at times—they were a health hazard at the least—but his pity and his sense of duty, no less than his politician’s instinct to be seen with the people, were such that the police were forbidden to drive them away or to harass them. They came for many different reasons—to protest against some injustice, such as a poet carrying out a hunger strike for eight days in front of Nehru’s gate to protest against the closing down of the Hindustani Theatre,6 because of drought, floods, or hunger, and above all as refugees from Pakistan or from some troubled area inside India itself.
I had many occasions to see Nehru in a different role, that of the formal and ceremonious prime minister, such as at Delhi airport for the official welcome, or farewell, to the Queen of England, President Eisenhower,7 Khrushchev,8 the Crown Prince and Princess of Japan,9 Chou En-lai,10 Nasser,11U Nu,12 a variety of Commonwealth prime ministers such as St Laurent13 and Diefenbaker14 of Canada, Mohamed Ali and several other prime ministers from Pakistan, Menzies15 of Australia, Nkrumah16 of Ghana, and Kotelawala17 and Mrs Bandaranaike18 of Ceylon. No head of government could be more distinguished, more at ease, yet more welcoming, than he was on these occasions. His felicity, combined, as it was, with energy and gravity, made him, without any effort on his part, the cynosure. This was true too of the various banquets and garden parties at the President’s palace, and of the great national celebrations in New Delhi, such as the Independence Day ceremony held each August in the Red Fort, or at the Republic Day parade held each January when a procession two to three hours’ long passed down Lutyens’ superb creation, the Central Vista, or Rajpath as it is now called.
On these occasions Nehru never ceased to be in full possession of his very quick wits. For instance, when the Queen of England was a guest at the 1961 Republic Day parade, there was a good deal of parading done on their own account by Indian politicians. Amongst these a group arrived a little late and, no places being reserved or left for them on the seats, they were asked by the attendants to sit on the ground, where in fact some hundreds of their fellow citizens were already sitting. This affronted their dignity and they went protesting to Nehru, who was sitting near the Queen. Nehru quietly got his daughter and the speaker to leave the Queen’s entourage and to lead the MPs away and to sit on the ground with them… I recall a reception eight years earlier at Constitution House when some MPs fell like famished boys on the tea, cakes, and bananas, and, in that Indian way born of centuries of having sweeper outcastes ready at hand to pick up any mess one cares to make, threw banana peel on the floor. Nehru, seeing this, pointedly got up, came along with a plate, and, without saying a wor
d, shamed them by picking up the mess himself… At the reception given to Sir John Hunt19 and his Mount Everest climbers in 1954, Nehru, with the preparedness and drive habitual to him, arrived early to look over the arrangements, including the placing of the chairs. Finding a horde of photographers taking up positions which would have blocked the view of the spectators he drove them off peremptorily, and as though he would strike them; they scattered before his wrath… At the last Delhi flower show I attended in 1962, I saw him again in an unceremonious temper with photographers when they were crowding around him in suffocating numbers and blocking his view of the flowers. They too scattered before his wrath… It was always refreshing to see Nehru falling on this plague of modern public life. His outbursts of temper could be calculated but mostly they were spontaneous. They were not deterred by any public setting, as those who once saw him dealing with a talkative ‘society’ woman at a music recital in Delhi are not likely to forget. Another outburst which will not be forgotten by those present occurred at the launching of the community development campaign at Alipore in 1952. The purpose was to stimulate the villagers into modernisation and development through self-help and village democracy, but, in the way so familiar in India, it was turned into a social occasion, with much parading, exhibitionism, and other vanities. It was uncomfortably hot, too. Nehru looked impatient when he arrived, the lower lip protruding in a way which always bode trouble, and cast his eyes threateningly around the gathering and the preparations. The proceedings then began with a speech from the President, broadcast from his palace in Delhi. It went on and on, irreproachable platitude following irreproachable platitude, and Nehru got more and more restive. As soon as the speech stopped he jumped up angrily, denounced speech making, vetoed any more speeches (several orators were waiting to say their pieces), and then led them off to dig a drain… I once saw him stop a minister of agriculture in full flight, tell him to sit down, and then make a speech on the theme of the inadequacy of the white-collar man in farming matters. These things made him feared rather than loved… Each year this disciple of industrialisation took his part in the ceremonial assemblage of dignitaries devoted to spinning cotton in celebration of Gandhi’s birthday. His expression betokened, I thought, mixed feelings.
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